The Finnish Game Industry Is in Trouble — Here’s Why No One’s Talking About It

[Music] Talking about billions, let's talk about Supercell Go and Trans Media. So, there was an announcement on LinkedIn, on YouTube that Supercell were partnering with Netflix to bring the war waging world of Clash to life like never before. A new animated series has been green lit and is currently in pre-production. That's all for now. More details are coming later, but we just couldn't keep a secret any longer. This is what the next nomination for the Finnish Awards in 2026 is the animation series on Netflix. Like, this is how [ __ ] low they're going to go, dude. Why don't you focus on making some [ __ ] successful games and stop [ __ ] dealing with this [ __ ] dude? Nonsense. All right, Chris, don't worry. There two different teams working on this. The development team is not working on this, so they can still work on great games. I'm so excited. [ __ ] distraction. It is a distraction from making money. So, so hold on. Let's take

a positive angle. So, the announcement was cool. The character looks awesome. Netflix is great. Trans Media is superb and this can invigorate the brand. So, back million years ago when I was heading partnership Supercell, everything was a no because everything was about focus and ROI. like we had all kinds of cool deals like you wouldn't even imagine thrown around by all kinds of companies. So, I wanted to take the same approach here and think about this from ROI perspective. So, I took a look at a an animated show that that Clash of Clans actually has been running for 8 years. It's called Clasharama. If you haven't seen, it's pretty fun. It's on YouTube. And Clash of Clans YouTube channel has 189 million subscribers. So, I took a look at the first Clasharama video and the last that was released a year ago and just how many views they have. First Clasharama video 8 years ago had 118

million views. That's awesome. That's how you get a TV show green lit. The latest Clashorama video from a year ago had 1.4 million views, which is really, really nice and absolutely fantastic. But it just shows the magnitude maybe of the interest and how much it has given over the years. Then I think it's important before making this type of a decision like we used to back in the days look at what others have done in the sector and what was their success. So, I took a look at Riot's Arcane. Huge success critically accolades like multiple Emmy awards and high viewership on Netflix, which they don't report, but it was not a financial success for Riot Games because their players are in China. that they didn't say. But but uh the $250 million production cost meant that the the show production cost meant that the show did not generate a profit

despite its popularity and it didn't significantly boost League of Legends player base or in-game spending. So to conclude, this could be massive success. Like when Angry Bird's movie launched, it was huge boost to the brand and to the business. But this could also be an endeavor that raises everybody's ego and burns hundreds of millions of dollars, distracts the leadership, and doesn't lead to anything too positive on the business side. So, if I'd be in Supercell's shoes, I'd definitely do this cuz this is so much fun to do this and it's so legacy building and you would get so many people engaged and it's it's just an amazing thing. But if I would be advising Supercell, I would say don't do it because this is a distraction. It's not good for the business. You have to focus on the relevant. So, I think the chance of this being ROI positive are slim, but the chance of this being super [ __ ] fun are really high. Okay, first of all, let

me just do a huge correction on your nonsense, dude. First of all, Angry Birds movie was definitely a success on the box office. I will not contest that. But the only result for the company was to sell for peanuts years later to the Japanese, right? The movie [ __ ] was a distraction. It didn't matter what for the business. The business is about making money, long-term profits, and revenue growth. Every nickel that they spent on that movie should have been dedicated to hiring people in management that could grow the business, right? To improve production and monetization and live ops, right? And so maybe maybe if they made the right investments instead of these stupid [ __ ] movies for Angry Birds, they would have been sold above the IPO price from like 5 years ago. Like that is not a proof positive on the success of a trans media strategy. That's actually the exact opposite. The exact opposite, dude. They sold out 5 years later below the IPO price because they could not grow this business profitably. And it was because of

distractions like this and merch and all this other crap that they were doing that they basically squandered the biggest IP in mobile gaming ever. Right. Yeah. And so now Clash of Clans is doing the same [ __ ] thing. You know, Supercell is doing the same thing. Now, I'll concede that they are outsourcing this to Netflix, which is actually pretty [ __ ] smart, right? So, let them deal with all the money that it costs to build this thing, but this is just a look over here thing, dude. [ __ ] fix Squadbusters, you know? Like, let's see. Actually, we haven't even looked at it. I don't know if it's we're seeing better metrics on this, but if you can't release a game in the last like 5 years that's successful, that's your problem. It's not exposure. Everyone knows Clash of Clans. You don't need to do this, right? You need to build successful games anyway. All right, enough. I have a question. So, first of all, you were partly right because they released the second Angry Birds movie that tanked and then that led to all the bad and prices and everything. This first one actually helped with the IPO, but that's irrelevant. Why do you think they

released this news that a show has been green lit? Like that was the question like why the PR because when is the show coming out? Two years. Like how long does it take to make an animated show? Probably two years, right? Takes 18 to 24 months. It takes five years from the start to airing episodes in general. Three years a year. I I just had a conversation with someone who like works on a bunch of the bento box shows. Actually, my friend Lawrence did at Fox, so like Bob's Burgers, etc. It takes 5 years start to finish to get a new show on the air from like the beginning of the pitch to the first thing. Animation Animation takes a lot longer than live television. And so like 3 years would be an accelerated schedule. Yeah. It's in pre-production. I was going to say it must be like a year and a half away. Yeah. Let's say year and a half to two. Why would you release this news now? Like I always think about when somebody has an publication, I'm like why are you telling me this? PR has been in the news for Clash of Clans.

Yeah. To talk about, right? So I'm just curious. It's It's really weird time to talk about this. It's just I'm just asking questions. Everybody's asking questions. Why are they talking about this Clash of Clans show? That's my terrible Trump impression. But that was really talking about it. No, that's that's a really bad impression. Uh stay in games, but let's stay on the Supercell train because they had other publications as well or PR this week, which is about AI and and actually this is something that has been on LinkedIn. Their CEO has been very actively posting about AI initiatives at the company and how excited he is about AI, how they're having these hackathons. And now there's a new job opening announced on LinkedIn. This is forund from Supercell. He's saying, "We are ramping up our AI innovation activities in the Bay Area and looking for an AI innovation lab program leader to help us dream what do future entertainment

experiences look and how they're built. Founder and or experience from the wider venture ecosystem considered a plus. Come create the future of entertainment with us. Interesting. Any takes on this? Like AI is the new new hot thing. Okay. So, I I know I know it's very on brand for me and we've established that I'm the king of rabbit holes. We haven't even mentioned that I'm the former crypto kid here, but look, yeah, I am fully converted that AI is the real deal and an incredible aid in the workplace. Of course you are. Of course you are. Of course I am. Of course you are. Let me let me give you a tangible example because again like crypto was all speculative. UFN has now you're saying it telling you I've said it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I've made a culpable many times and given presses flowers for being 100% right. But here here's an example. I told you already that Prison Break Tycoon is launching this week. So

we've got a top tier gamefam thumbnail team. Like multiple people dedicated just to thumbnails. But Roblox are the big ticket projects. That's where the money's made. So like my little hyper casual prison break tycoon experiment isn't a top priority. And so this week I skipped six weeks worth of meetings, feedback loops, and internal cost spend by spending one hour with chat GPT. I got two very solid thumbnails for AB testing that we will be running when we launch this game. I had no need to bother that team with low priority work that may or may not generate any revenue. And so like this is just one of a couple experiences I've had over the past couple weeks where I'm like I'm leaning in. Like I'm going to learn Python. I'm testing new workflows and I'm just excited by like how useful chat GPT4 is. Especially when I compare it to that article I wrote for our friends at Homo magazine two years ago that was like AI is not going to replace your art

team. AI just replaced my marketing team. Did you write an article that AI is not going to replace your your It was Yeah, it was for Homa. They they reached out. She's got the best. You got the best predictions. It was AI isn't ready to replace your art team yet and I talked about what it would need to do to get there and we're much closer to what I wrote about. So, like honestly, if you're not using chat GPT daytoday or something similar like jump on board, future proof your career. This isn't crypto. It can help you with your work dayto-day right now. In fact, my executive assistant agent helped me tighten up this section right here. So, Cassie, you you using chat GBT at all? Is this another shut the [ __ ] up Ethan moment or am I on something? for for once. I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it in this context. I think you're actually absolutely right on this one, Ethan. I will support you 100%. I have actually made a far more This is on a personal level. I made a more

concerted effort since Bing's like doom and gloom speech at GDC where he suggested that everyone that has gaming DNA and gaming product knowledge and live ops should go to non-gaming apps. And then he also said that everyone should be using AI every day. And I think I think that he is totally right about that point. Actually, probably both for that matter. And this is going to sound a bit stupid. I'll be honest, but AI is just much of an easier technology to absorb. You know what I mean? Like it's a really easy thing to use. It's [ __ ] conversational. You know, even like learning computers back in the day or even like online stuff, all that stuff was a lot harder like to actually do to go from one to the other. So, it's like kind of set up well to understand. And so the better you get at conversating with it, right? Or the better like at prompting you are and the more experience you have, just the better you get at it. And it's really easy, right? And to put this in context, when I was at Kabam like 10 years ago, people were telling me, "Oh my god, big

data is the future. You need to build analytics. You need to understand SQL. You need to do like scraping and all this other shit." I'm like, dude, I'm too old for this [ __ ] I don't want to learn that, dude. That's like too [ __ ] hard, you know? This is not hard, right? This is not hard at all. And so you should be using it every day, right? It's like super powerful, right? And you know, a lot of the deep analytics that still makes the other things so complicated is embedded within the models themselves. Like this is not crypto, right? This is you don't need a PhD in [ __ ] you know? Like you basically just need to [ __ ] use the technology, right? You don't need to like Yeah. You don't need a [ __ ] like you need understand all these acronyms and all this other crap that no one, you know, unless you're economist can understand. So anyway, I think everyone should be using it to help facilitate understanding on what's going on and get perspective from something that's reasonably objective. Like this is the problem. It's like you start relying it too much and you don't really know exactly what you're getting. But whatever, that's a whole other discussion. But yeah, everyone should be using this every day. If they're not, you're going to get really far behind. I

think this is an interesting approach in how different executives talk about AI because what we've seen is there's the stresses of the world and some others who are sort of calming people down that hey you know you know AI is not there it's not going to replace anything it's this and that and we're they're not leaning that heavily into it and then there's the other vector or the other side of the aisle which is the ilas of the world these founders who are like we're all in in AI and kind of leading the way and bringing new talent to push the AI into the organization. So, I'm I'm just curious of of like which one is the better strategy to get this transformation because I feel like this one works better because it's so open and it's driven by the leadership versus the one where the leadership is kind of like developing different AI tools almost secretly just not to disturb the artists and the QA that are for sure going to get laid off once it starts properly working. So, it's just interesting and it would be also interesting to hear from folks at

Supercell like what's their take on AI. There must be people who are super excited and must be people who are terrified. I mean, if you think about Take 2's history with mobile and how they're a slow follower, right? They wait till it's proven and then they acquire. That's always been their jam. They like poo pooed mobile for what, a decade or more before they're like, "Oh, okay. Social point zinga nom nom nom nom nom." Right? But like just to talk about how one of the things experiments I'm planning on running right now if you think about a organization as big and with as many products as take two and you think about writing test plans from design documents right that is a non-trivial cost of thankless work right you have design this is something I deal with all the time I have a design document it's done it might be one feature if you're a live ops game it might 70 pages, you have to turn that into test plans so that QA can then execute against it. All right. If I'm a startup

with one game, like having one QA person dedicating 25% of their time to it is not a big cost. If I'm take two overall and I could replace all test plan writing with AI, which I'm pretty [ __ ] sure you could as long as you're good at it, right? Like that's a meaningful costsaving. So I think for someone like Take 2 not to be taking that seriously on an how shits made level like the tools are ready to do that today. But there's a lot of nuance to what I think he's saying about AI like replacing the those type of operational things is I'm sure fine in his book. I think the AI creating content is just what I think he's more objecting to and that I think we are far away from that. So, what I'm trying to suggest is that as a knowledge worker or whatever the [ __ ] you want to call the professionals out there, you got to be using AI to help facilitate your processes because that's to remain competitive, right?

Whether or not AI is going to be able to create games, you know, like the next Call of Duty, I I think you're so far away from that. It's a multiplier on a small number of people who have actual talent as opposed to throwing bodies and money at a situation. So something I'd say like I know we've talked about small peanuts relative to like billion dollars a year from Dungeon Fighter, but if you think about Bellatro and if you think about the amount of entertainment per hour one developer has been able to create by making rogike games, AI is very similar. If you are a one to five person team making rogike games, you can 10x the depth of your game by intelligently using AI. So where I believe AI innovation is really important is that it is going to make smaller numbers of talented people deliver more value per hour at a lower cost to players. And now when I say that where that should scare

people is that's not what's going to lead to the next billion dollar a year super live ops game. What it's going to lead to is a race to the bottom where people like me are going to make a game that someone can spend a thousand hours on. We're going to sell it for $4.99 and suddenly you're going to be like, "Yeah, I mean GTA 6 for $80. It looks really cool and all, but I'm too busy playing Bleeplorp. I've got 5,000 hours logged on Bleeplorp. Can you believe one person made Bleeplorp? It's $2. You have to buy it today." Like, that's where we're going. No, we're not. No, we're not 100%. I 100% disagree with that. Leaport is going to destroy. Let's Let's move on. There's just no way. I swear I had better legs. Longer legs. Yeah. No. Stop. Just stop. Okay. Shut the [ __ ] up, Ethan. Moving on. [Music]